Condoleezza Rice: The Champion for Women

Here’s how we’re used to seeing Condoleezza Rice: clicking down a cool marble hallway in her Ferragamo heels and tailored suit, the only female in a phalanx of men, ready to wrangle arms agreements and negotiate border disputes. Who would have expected to find her in khakis and a casual shirt, sitting in a stifling, dirt-floor tent in a Sudanese camp for displaced persons, surrounded by women talking about rape? Yet that’s where she was in July 2005, hearing from women who’d fled genocide in Darfur only to fall victim to attacks by rebel troops, camp guards, even government officers. “I was really emotionally drained by that,” Rice recalls of her visit. “The experience led me to want to do something about sexual violence against women.”

It was another defining moment for the woman dubbed the Warrior Princess, whose rise is now political legend. She went from a childhood in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, to provost at Stanford University (where she was the first female, first minority and youngest person to hold the title), then to national security adviser for President Bush in 2001 and, four years later, to U.S. Secretary of State (the first African American female with that job, too).

Her tenure has been controversial, but the din over the war in Iraq has drawn public attention away from some of her most important work at the State Department: championing the rights and health of women around the world. In June she got the U.N. Security Council to officially recognize rape as a weapon of war. “Rape was always viewed as a circumstance of war,” Rice says, “either hush-hush or not in the category of other crimes against humanity. This is a strong message that yes, it is [a crime].”

Quietly but forcefully, Rice helped to both secure a $50 million presidential initiative to fight sex and labor slavery worldwide and launch the first major women’s health campaign in the Middle East. This year, she started the $100 million One Woman Initiative, a public-private partnership that trains Muslim women for leadership. “The difference she’s made is immeasurable,” says Carly Fiorina, a cochair of One Woman. “She’s a visionary,” agrees Democratic strategist Donna Brazile. “She’s created innovative programs for women to serve in leadership roles, helping them to reform their governments.”

Darfurians still talk about Rice, says Assistant Secretary for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer. The women Frazer met there marveled that Rice had listened so patiently; what many didn’t know is that she’d gone on to persuade the United States to allocate $15 million for rape centers and other programs to restore their lives. Says Frazer, “The women told me, ‘She is our sister.’”

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Photographed by Norman Jean Roy at the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C.